"About the only place I've found where you can get more than a hot dog is at one of the museums."

"A free shuttle bus that circles the Mall would be very helpful on very hot and very cold days, and for elderly and handicapped people."

"Bathrooms, bathrooms, bathrooms."

About 25 million people visit the National Mall every year, more than the number of visitors to Yellowstone, Yosemite and Grand Canyon national parks combined. But maybe no other attraction as popular as the Mall gets such deeply mixed reviews. More than 23,000 comments submitted to the National Park Service show what many of us already know: The Mall could be better. Much, much better. Not just more adequately maintained, but more accessible by transportation, more informative and more connected to the city around it.

Fixing it won't be easy, however, in part because the 700-acre Mall is so many different things to different people. It is a national source of patriotism and an internationally known symbol of democracy. It is a public meeting space. It is a place to learn. It is a place to play.

Americans agree that the Mall should be better known for its museums and memorials than for its shabby grass and visitors' aching bladders. But should there be more places to eat, or should retail be stricken from such a treasured public place? Should it be easier or harder to play a game of soccer? And where will we honor those whose sacrifices are yet to come or practice our right to assemble?

Visitors aren't the only ones with a new vision for the Mall. After years of research, five public agencies and a newly formed private trust are working on plans to improve the Mall. But despite what the agencies call unprecedented cooperation, critics still complain that there's no central authority with complete oversight when it comes to the most hallowed real estate in D.C.

And even if the agencies do agree on some common goals, the question remains: Who will pay for them?

Plans for the Mall generally fall into two categories: instituting maintenance and management practices that will strengthen its ability to serve (and withstand) millions of visitors; and luring the visitors who clog the attractions between the Lincoln Memorial and the Capitol to other parts of the city.

While the Smithsonian Institution operates the museums -- including the shuttered and currently unused Arts and Industries Building -- maintenance of the Mall itself falls to the National Park Service. Its efforts to maintain a pristine park for all Americans are, by all accounts, woefully underfunded by the federal government. The park service itself agrees. It says more than $250 million of maintenance requests lack money to execute them. Others say it's more like $350 million.

Enter Akridge

Luckily, one of the locals who enjoys running on the Mall regularly is developer Chip Akridge, who has an apartment on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, is a Vietnam veteran and has developed more than $2 billion in real estate. When Akridge talks about the Mall, he sounds like many of the thousands of people who wrote the park service; he is incredibly proud of it and ashamed of it all at once. He didn't realize the Mall's poor condition until someone else mentioned it to him. The next time he ran on there, he looked around.

"I was disgusted, frankly," he recalls. "I was just appalled."

Akridge personally donated $250,000 to found the Trust for the National Mall, a private venture modeled after the Central Park Conservancy in New York, and he has helped raise $2.5 million for initial operations. But that's just the beginning: The trust may shoot to raise as much as $500 million in a campaign headed by a figure with national prominence.

Some of that money could help put a dent in the maintenance backlog. The park service must maintain 80 historic structures, 2,000 American elms, 3,000 cherry blossom trees, 170 flower beds, 35 ornamental pools and 43 ball fields. The Mall plays host to 3,000 permitted events a year.

"It's a property manager's day from hell," Akridge says. "If you don't have the money, you don't get the results in the property management business. There's no sleight of hand."

Other than funding the backlog of repairs, exactly what the money Akridge hopes to raise will pay for is still unknown. After nearly two years of public vetting, the park service is considering three plans for shaping and improving the Mall. Here are the choices:

? Strengthen the Mall's core historic qualities as a place to reflect and gather, specifically its paths, grass and trees. "Visitors probably wouldn't notice many changed facilities, but they would notice maintenance changes. It would look a lot better," says Susan Spain, project executive for the plan.

? Better serve visitors with bathrooms, sidewalk cafes, maps and transportation. Consider overhauling Union Square, an area adjacent to the Capitol presently home to the Capitol Reflecting Pool, into a hard-surfaced space that could accommodate crowds and serve as something other than a backdrop for class pictures. That has some civil liberties groups outraged, claiming the right to demonstrate on the Mall could be marginalized.

? Focus on the Mall as a recreational area and green space, with resources dedicated to sustaining the grass on which many sporting leagues operate. This could include re-engineering the soil into a more breathable mixture that would not get deeply compacted, much as has been done with the Great Lawn in New York's Central Park.

Some combination of the three will likely make up the agency's final choice, due in November, and will certainly include better information for visitors exiting the Smithsonian Metro station. The trick will be to balance the needs of traditionalists and innovators, tourists and locals, in pulling ideas from all three themes. "It has to be all three of those," Spain says. "But how do you blend them together?"

Standing room for statues

A great point of contention in recent years has been where to put new memorials and monuments, a debate that came to a head with the National World War II Memorial in the late 1990s and led to the creation of a nonprofit citizens group, the National Coalition to Save Our Mall.

Although the coalition lauds the joint planning effort, it wants more. "The problem is that nobody has jurisdiction over the National Mall in the whole," says Judy Feldman, the coalition's president.

The group has urged the formation of a commission with central governing authority to create a vision. It points to the 1902 McMillan Commission, which extended the Mall and laid out a plan for the area in the 20th century. The coalition dubs its effort the Third Century Initiative.

"All these different agencies can do their plans -- and that's good that we're working together -- but ultimately none of them is going to amount to that," says Feldman, who penned an essay for a book just published by Johns Hopkins University, "The National Mall: Rethinking Washington's Monumental Core."

Indeed, as good as the complementary planning initiatives are, they are still that, complementary. With so many competing jurisdictional authorities, D.C. has always been a hotbed for planning angst. "You can't swing a dead cat without hitting someone with a piece of the planning process," says Jeff Soule, an expert with the American Planning Association.

A chasm remains between the agencies' differing views of what the Mall should be. The city sees a great urban park, while the park service envisions a natural park with pristine greenery.

For its part, the National Capital Planning Commission, the federal planning agency for the Washington region, sees a completed park with no room for expansion and little chance for evolution. The commission completed its Legacy Plan in 1997 outlining its vision for the Mall in this century. Its thrust: locate future memorial and museums in other parts the city.

The NCPC, along with the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, is busy completing a report due this summer on how it will "create great public places beyond the National Mall." The Mall's popularity -- more people visit the Washington Monument, the Lincoln Memorial and Vietnam Veterans Memorial than other D.C. sites -- is both a blessing and a curse. Because it attracts so many visitors, the Mall is the most desired place for any group seeking approval for a new memorial or museum, crowding it further and cluttering the landscape.

A few new projects have already been approved for the Mall -- a Martin Luther King Jr. memorial on the Tidal Basin, a National Museum of African American History and Culture beside the National Museum of American History and a visitor's center for the Vietnam wall -- NCPC and Congress basically have a moratorium on additional projects.

So where does that leave future projects, such as a museum of Latino history, a women's history museum or memorials to Dwight Eisenhower and John Adams? A model for future projects, says Elizabeth Miller, NCPC project manager, is the U.S. Navy Memorial on Pennsylvania Avenue NW, a "place that is loved by people who live here, work here and visit here."

The NCPC has already compiled a list of 100 sites for future memorials and monuments and decided on the 20 best; the agency's challenge is getting memorial planners to agree with it about the sites' appeal. The sites listed fall largely along the spokes of the L'Enfant City -- North Capitol, East Capitol and South Capitol streets and the area around the Kennedy Center. All are stretches that few tourists -- and not many locals -- would otherwise explore. And for good reasons: crime, filth, noise, darkness, crummy sidewalks and no information as to whether there is something worthwhile up ahead. Heading down South Capitol Street from the Capitol is definitely not what grandma has in mind for her trip to D.C. But maybe it will be someday.

A bridge, not a barrier

The NCPC and Harriet Tregoning, planning director for the District, are focused on beautifying some of the ugliest trips off the Mall. While the NCPC pitches memorial sites off the Mall, D.C. is undergoing a renaissance that will bring $4.2 billion of newly completed real estate and attractions this year alone. D.C. officials want to Mall to serve as the city's core, not a barrier, as many now call it.

As D.C. works with private developers to put new amenities into its neighborhoods -- particularly along the waterfronts -- Tregoning is eager to get people off the Mall and headed to the Southwest Waterfront, the Nationals Park-anchored Capitol riverfront, the old convention center site and Poplar Point. "In some ways, they've been too successful with the Mall as a brand," Tregoning says, to the point where visitors don't bother considering other ideas. Spain, from the park service, agrees, saying, "One thing I clearly hear from people is, 'I didn't know there was this much to do.'"

That agreement is something you don't often hear in Washington, where turf equals power. "They want people off the Mall," Tregoning says. "That's something we share in common."

Getting to the new attractions, however, is a concern. The city and the Downtown Business Improvement District are preparing a bid to have Circulator Buses -- equipped with tourism information -- replace the private Tourmobile service that has been running since 1969. It's too early to say whether the National Park Service, which puts the Tourmobile service out to bid, would open up the process. And such a maneuver could create political challenges, since it would basically mean governmental entities taking a contract away from a private business.

But Tregoning says she wants to show off smart growth and public transportation so boldly that D.C. would serve as kind of "a permanent world's fair" for visitors, and the NCPC is on the same page.

Some of the ideas are simple. Streetlights, better sidewalks, signs and green space might encourage visitors to wander into the city. A tourist standing on the Mall and Seventh Street NW has no indication right now that just five blocks north sit the vibrant Penn Quarter and Gallery Place neighborhoods filled with restaurants and bars. Likewise, if tourists head south on Seventh Street today, they'll end up in the bland Southwest Federal Center area, which generally becomes an uninhabited office canyon at 5 p.m. That could change once the planned PN Hoffman-Streuever Bros. waterfront and Washington Maritime Center open, as soon as 2012. But tourists need signs to point them there.

Other connections won't be so easy to make. Three of the NCPC's six favored memorial sites are west of the Lincoln Memorial. Two are near the Kennedy Center, which thanks to the E Street expressway exchange, is almost impossible to walk to from the Ellipse or the Lincoln Memorial. Thomas Luebke, secretary of the U.S. Commission of Fine Arts, says it might be worthwhile to build a deck over the interchange to the banks of the Potomac, an endeavor that would cost tens of millions of dollars. As for getting to Arlington Cemetery and the NCPC's top site, on the western edge of Memorial Bridge, Luebke says he hopes the existing Potomac bridges might one day be reconfigured to be more pedestrian friendly. "We don't expect they'll be rebuilt soon. But we do think it's something that should be raised at some point," he says.

People who make it as far south as the Jefferson Memorial, meanwhile, are rarely wont to carry on to Hains Point. There is even less reason to make the two-mile-plus trek now that The Awakening statue is gone. But there are big ideas for East Potomac Park as well, Luebke says, such as returning the shore along the Washington Channel to a wetlands -- a site for environmental education and wildlife. Or building a Metro stop on the Yellow Line, which passes underneath. Many of the ideas are expensive -- a Metro station could easily cost well more than $100 million -- and many of them are long term. But the planning is happening now. Luebke says it also might be time to get rid of the paved bottom of the pool at Constitution Gardens, north of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, in favor of something more natural. "It's basically a big bathtub," he said.